


Keep the Faith (It's Only You and Me)

by reddish



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-01
Updated: 2015-02-01
Packaged: 2018-03-10 00:59:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,741
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3270884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reddish/pseuds/reddish
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Reeling after his personal mission and the loss of what he knew, Tasiran seeks to comfort Iron Bull. But she's never known the Qun, and he's never known anything but.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Keep the Faith (It's Only You and Me)

A distance grew between the Bull and Tasiran after their alliance with the Qunari fell through. Of course, for her, it was only a failed alliance. A big one, but nothing she couldn’t recover from.

 For him… she barely knew where to begin guessing what he was feeling. She knew he feared madness. She knew he feared losing the foundation of his belief, the thing that kept him grounded, gave him something to always fall back on when the earth beneath him crumbled and his sight went red.

 But she didn't really understand how losing the Qun would weigh on his broad shoulders. How the sickness chewing at his gut would keep him from eating, wondering if he should perhaps train less, step away from his team. How he worried that the anxiety inside him, sometimes anger, was the precursor for what created the Tal Vashoth he had slain.

 He feared himself without a leash, and the Qun had been the only leash that had ever been fitted for him.

 He had broken it.

 If he could break the Qun, what couldn't he break?

  _Freedom, pah. More like existential terror served over cold, runny eggs._

 Tasiran worried for him. Tried to talk to him, but there weren't words for this yet. He was with her in battle and in bed, but his head wasn't in it. He was mechanical, quiet. He didn't even come. There was nothing fulfilling to be found, because his fingers hesitated at her skin. And finally, when she saw him flinch from delivering her body pain that would have been just the beginning of their play, she understood that he was terrified.

 And what could she say to him? She was Vashoth. Born outside the Qun, never even given a chance to break away from it. What she knew of the Qun, it was nothing like what he had felt.  Where she saw at best, a philosophy for life, and at worst, a caste system that punished diversity, he had been told it was the only way to live. And she certainly hadn't seen the damage from his moments of doubt in Seheron.

 She couldn't know.

 But her hands encircled one of his, slender fingers winding around the long and short fingers of his large, rough, shaking hand.

 "You're not going to break," she said, quietly.

 He started to pull away, a jerk in his muscles that he fought against. She saw it in his neck. "You can't know that," he argued.

 "I think I can."

 "How?"

 "Because this is all there is, kadan. You're as dangerous today as you were a month ago. Nothing has changed."

 "That's the point," he looked down. "You don't get it. You can't."

 "Help me get it."

 "I need..." he clenched his jaw, interrupting his speech. "Needed. Shit, I don't know. I served something. My blood, my body. It was theirs. Now I'm a weapon built for one purpose, but I'm cut off from it. Forever. That drives a man _mad_ , kadan. And if I go mad, I may..." His voice trailed. He couldn't speak it.

 Tasiran rested her cheek against his shoulder, vitaar hardly a threat to her. "Tal Vashoth, the ones you tell me of, they ran _from_ their purpose in the Qun, Bull. Their madness began because they were told they only had one purpose, and they wanted more. You aren't them."

 He swore in Qunlat, and she held him. "What do you think I did? When I chose. I was running. I chose this, too. Just like they did. Maybe I already _am_ mad."

 "You didn't run away from anything. You saved your people."

 "I let my people die."

 "No," Tasiran shook her head, holding his hand firm. "You saved _your_ people."

 "The dreadnought was destroyed," he said louder, looking up at her.

 "Tell me the name of one person who was on it."

 He squeezed his eye shut. "That's not the point!"

 "It is! It is the entire point, Bull. You left the Qun for a reason, and it wasn't philosophy or politics, and you weren't in a blind murderous rage. Your men were going to die, and some ancient principles a continent away from you said they should. You disagreed. You acted. You _saved_ them.  Is that the action of some rage-blind monster that needed the Qun to cage him?"

 He shrugged, a little too forcefully, knocking Tasiran away from his shoulder. She swallowed hard, trying to keep herself from backing down. Maybe she _should_. But this was personal to her, too. His belief, whether he meant it to or not, spoke of his view of her. Where she came from. She was arguing with his self-doubt and her own.

She tried a different tactic. "You lost something I can't ever understand. I know that. I can't tell you it was right, because I’m not a Tamassran or someone with the knowledge you need. But I _know_ it didn't make you a monster. I wasn't born a monster without the Qun, and you weren't born one under it."

 "I've felt it before," he growled quietly. "The lust for blood. Being lost. Hungry. Full of rage and pain and just wanting to destroy _everything_. I've been there. Don't tell me it doesn't exist. Please."

 "It was real, but it was also during a war, Bull. And you _didn't_ lose yourself to it."

 His hand gripped hers, tight, tense. "Only through re-education. Only through work and struggle and discipline that I didn't know if I could survive. Didn’t know what I’d be on the other side of it all."

 Tasiran ran her thumb over his hand, breathing easier. "How do you think the rest of us manage?"

 "Say what?" The quiet question jerked him out of the darker place, albeit unwillingly.

 "You're not the only people who strive for a purpose, who fight to feel like they're keeping their shit together. I mean... I hate to say it, but. The Iron Bull, at worst, you're just like the rest of us now. And the rest of us, we get by. Or we don't. But we have a say in it. It doesn't just happen."

 Silent for a couple minutes, The Iron Bull looked down at their entwined hands in his lap. When he spoke again, it was slower. The pressure was gone. "My Chargers, you, the Inquisition. Say you _are_ my people. I still abandoned the thing I believed in more than anything. What's to stop me from doing it again? How can you trust someone like me?”

 “How can I trust the guy who risked his entire life and belief system to save the people he led to battle?”

 “Okay,” he laughed quietly, and she saw his shoulders adjust, loosen in the process. “When you say it like that, you make it sound so fucking easy.”

 Tasiran shrugged. “Trusting you _is_ fucking easy. The rest of it – life and stuff – not so much. But…” She used her free hand to lift the chain of her necklace, a thick tooth carved down to a manageable size dangling at its end, capped in gold. “You’re not alone, kadan. I guess that’s… really all I wanted to tell you.”

 “That’s all?” He cast a small smirk her direction.

 “Ass.” She pushed against him with her hands, playful in spirit, but he tightened his hold on her and slid both of his palms up her arms, still bare from how the night had begun. But his fingers were suddenly insistent, as he pulled her closer to his chest.

 Her breasts pushed to his as he clung to her, held her to him, it was hard to say. It didn’t much matter. Bull’s nails dragged down the smooth skin of her back, and her cheek rested against the strong support of his neck and shoulder. He blew hot breath against her as he bowed into her neck, but his lips were still against her. There was just breath, in, out. Slow. Purposeful.

 Tasiran raised one hand to the back of his head, holding him there against her.

 “You’re safe,” she whispered.

 “You don’t know that.”

 “You’re right. But I believe it, or I wouldn’t be here with you.” She continued stroking the stubble of his shaved head with delicate patience. “Or do Tal Vashoth not have watchwords?”

 He growled against her, but the rumble was quiet, and his teeth nipped at her skin.  “I’m not Tal Vashoth.”

 “What are you then?” Tasiran arched into his mouth slightly.

 “I’m The Iron Bull,” he spoke louder against her, tickling the hairs along her neck.

 Tasiran laughed and clung to his back a bit stronger with her other hand. “What’s that?”

 “I’m The Iron Fucking Bull!” He lifted his head as he roared it, pushing her down to the bed while grinning his cheeky, toothy, lopsided grin.

 “There you are,” Tasiran said, missing a breath.

 “Oh yeah,” he agreed, looming down over her.

 “Welcome home,” Tasi chuckled as she reached up to his cheeks, gently pulling him down to her again. “I missed you.”

 “I’m here,” Bull assured her as he pinned her arms back above her head. “Always.”

 The fear abated for the moment, he let himself ease back into the life that, truth be told, he had already known. He kissed her fiercely, teeth and tongue pulling at her lips and biting when she responded to his attention. The body that was once in service to another calling took little time to reacquaint itself with his new mission, his new leader, the person he called both kadan and lover who squirmed eagerly beneath him.

 Being a man his size, he wasn’t used to being able to put the things he broke back together. But maybe, when something this big broke, the pieces left could be used to make… something. Something he could recognize. And, shit, the way his heart pounded in his chest at her touch made him sure, if just for that short time, he was still the man he knew he was. The man she knew him to be. The man the Chargers would follow, no questions asked.

 The Qun had declared the role he would play, and shaped the man to fit the role. The role may have been gone, but the man remained.  And though the freedom of finding a new role was no less paralyzing and terrifying, for a night at least, he felt like himself again.

 


End file.
